Jimmy Carter: Why We Don’t Want Sunday School Teachers as Presidents

The other day, an Ohio University emeritus economics professor and senior fellow at the Independent Institute named Richard Vedder wrote in The American Spectator a thank-you note to Jimmy Carter on his 100th birthday — a thank you for his service to his family, God, and country. He spoke of Carter’s “innate niceness,” and his “honesty, loyalty, … sincere concern for others … and strong Christian faith.” Vedder noted Carter’s modest post-presidential lifestyle, including teaching Sunday School and attending church. Vedder also noted that he voted against Carter in 1976 and 1980, agreed that Carter deserved low marks as president, but he lamented that neither presidential candidate in 2024 has the personal qualities that Carter possessed. 

Put aside the evidence of Carter’s meanness and ruthlessness during, and in some cases after, his presidency. Put aside his deplorable efforts in 1990 to undermine President George H. W. Bush’s international coalition to evict Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. The simple truth is that we don’t want Sunday School teachers running our government in a very dangerous world. And Jimmy Carter made our world a lot more dangerous when he was president. Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel and some American citizens in Israel; the Houthis terror activities in Yemen and the Red Sea; the attacks on Israel by Hezbollah; and the most recent launching by Iran of nearly 200 ballistic missiles against Israel — all can be traced back to Carter’s Iran policy in the late 1970s. 

Carter’s Iran policy marked a dramatic shift from every post–World War II American administration. All of Carter’s postwar predecessors understood the importance of having a friendly government in Iran. Truman persuaded the Soviet Union to abandon its control of northern Iran after World War II. Eisenhower responded to a revolution that toppled the Shah from power by intervening covertly to put the Shah back in power. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson recognized the Shah’s value as a bulwark against Soviet encroachments in the Middle East/Persian Gulf region. Presidents Nixon and Ford made the Shah a pillar of U.S. influence in the region per an extended Nixon Doctrine, which relied on client-states to protect U.S. interests. All of this came tumbling down due to the incompetence of Jimmy Carter. 

The Iranian Revolution that resulted in fundamentalist Islamic clerics seizing power in Iran was, in the words of Norman Podhoretz, “an unrecognized harbinger” of our 45-year struggle against Islamofascism. Jeane Kirkpatrick was one of the first observers to recognize this in her brilliant essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” which appeared in the November 1979 issue of Commentary. In the lead-up to the Shah’s overthrow, she wrote, “[T]he Carter administration not only failed to prevent the undesired outcome, it actively collaborated in the replacement of [a] moderate autocrat friendly to American interests with [a] less friendly autocrat of extremist persuasion.” Moreover, Kirkpatrick noted, the new Iranian regime was “hostile to American interests and policies in the world.” Perhaps Carter believed having a friendly regime in Iran was not that important anymore since he announced to the world in his first major foreign policy speech that the United States was “now free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear.”

Carter famously launched a “human rights” campaign, but in Iran, Nicaragua, and later Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion, human rights worsened as a result of Carter’s incompetence. Kirkpatrick wrote that Carter’s foreign policy “fails not for lack of good intentions but for lack or realism.” The Sunday School teacher failed because good intentions are meaningless in international relations. The personal qualities so admired by Professor Vedder has us today on the brink of World War III. Donald Trump, who Vedder appears to dislike (he doesn’t appear to like Kamala Harris either), may lack some of the personal qualities of Carter, but his presidency produced four years of peace and prosperity, marred only by the COVID-19 pandemic unleashed on the world by communist China. 

So, thanks President Carter — for nothing.

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